Sunday, December 29, 2013

In issue B of Russian Prose is a machine translation of Alexander Skidans essay on Kathy Acker. I translated it into English or Norwegian or Danish and back again to Russian, as far as I can remember. There's a conceptual introduction by Dmitry Golynko following the text. Happy birthday to Alexander! Here's parts of our shy reading at Audiatur 2007.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Whether vamp or self-enclosed nonpersona, Lunch's "personality" as manifested on stage did not open itself to autobiographical speculation. This was a typical punk strategy. In breaking with the convention of passive audience reaction to performance, she also expressed contempt for the so-called autobiographical singer/songwriters of the early seventies, such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, or Bruce Springsteen, whose lyrics rested on self-revelation of personality. When they performed live, the success (plausibility) of their acts necessitated an exploitation of the audience's belief in both their personas and their private lives. But this "honesty" was more likely a dramatic quasi-fiction, invented as a hook on which to hang their songs' narrative "I." More theatrically sophisticated performers such as David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Iggy Pop, or Alice Cooper played with the artifice (or complexity) behind the device of the performer-songwriter's "I," making the entire pose dubious or unnecessary. Punk performers, in rejecting stardom, chose to give the audience nothing of their so-called self.